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Comment by slowin | Hacker News Reader

I'm also grateful to the Chinese labs for providing workarounds for the walled gardens that the US based AI companies are attempting to create.

Does anyone know if there are any distillation datasets available? I'd love to see these distributed on BitTorrent. I think it's critical that AI be democratized and not isolated in the hands of a few private companies.

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An authoritarian regime is not your friend and will pullback the moment their own models become highly capable.

Oh no, they might stop doing the thing that benefits me and that they were never required to do in the first place.

It can be predatory pricing that will bite us later.

How exactly will downloaded gguf files bite me later?

Is it going to shut the laptop's lid when i'm not looking and pinch my fingers?

If the only thing that bothers you is laptop lid pinching your fingers, then no – it won't do it.

It really can't be when the models are open weights and there's zero lock-in for inference providers.

Open weight is not open source. See: freeware vs free software.

Ok, so?

You have the lock-in, as you can't modify the freeware. You will be stuck will all its anti-features. Also, have a look at the reasons for having the four freedoms of free software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

What does the ability to modify a model have to do with lock-in?

Models aren’t software. Software has a learning curve and costs of adoption. Models and inference are completely fungible.

> What does the ability to modify a model have to do with lock-in?

For example, Chinese models can spread the CCP propaganda and censor the results. You can't change it and may not even notice.

> Models aren’t software.

Models are software. They run on computers, require development, can have bugs etc. They can be downloaded or provided as SaaS.

> Models and inference are completely fungible.

Until the next version of DeepSeek becomes closed and you will only have the access to the last good open-weight model.

Sorry, are you actually paying any attention to the discussion? You’re spouting a bunch of buzzword non sequiturs. You started off by talking about how open weights aren’t open source when nobody said anything about open source. Now you’re talking about propaganda in response to a question about lock-in.

Lock-in means you can’t switch to a different model or a different provider because the cost (in time or money) of switching is high. Censorship and propaganda have nothing to do with it. You can switch to DeepSeek in an instant. You can switch away from it in an instant. The switching cost is zero.

And no, models are data files. The inference engines are software. Models run on many engines and most engines support many models. Another example of how there’s no lock-in: you can switch both models and engines at no cost. If you’re using an inference provider, they probably offer many models you can switch between, and you can switch to a different provider with no effort.

If the next version of DeepSeek becomes closed then you can switch to GLM or Kimi or MiniMax or whatever else in two seconds, or keep on using the last open version of DeepSeek. Zero lock-in.

As opposed to what? The US? You think the US is any different? Literally our pedo president publicly admits to insider trading. You think the US government gives a rat's ass about the American people?

The US has a structure that makes it possible to change the government, China has president for life and one party rule.

You say that as our pedo president is testing waters by doing another term and his republican lackeys are supporting him on this.

Also at the end of the day what matters is whether the government serves the people and the peoples quality of life.

Quality of life for the Chinese people has steadily increased. Quality of life for the American people has steadily decreased.

Saying the Chinese and US governments are the same is so absurd it doesn't warrant a reply.

For someone (as me) in Mexico, they are exactly the same.

Third world societies are not "brainwashed" one way or another with respect to that.

We just see those governments throwing shade at each other. And bullying us ina similar way.

They are not what they are to you, they are not just whatever you care about, they are what they actually are.

Do you see the self-centeredness of your comment? Why is his (Mexican) perspective wrong? Just because you say it is?

Do you not see you're projecting? If I say two different types of bird are "the same to me" because they both shit on my head, that doesn't make them the same birds, that just means I only care about what they are to me, i.e. the self-centeredness you accuse me of.

You said "for me they are the same". Not in reply to someone saying "to me they're different", but to someone saying they're very different in nature, which they are. That's not a perspective, that's changing the subject and making it about you.

>You said "for me they are the same". Not in reply to someone saying "to me they're different"

You are arguing with another user; it was I who said it.

They have some differences, yet they are the same in a lot of ways. Some people cannot see it because they have been educated a certain way. Lots of people in China really believe they are right and the US is wrong. Same in Korea, Same in Rusia. Similary, a lot of people in the US are educated to believe the US is "the best country in the world", "the good guys", "always right"; they are not.

Ah, sorry for getting you two mixed up.

I can agree to to it with the qualifier "in a lot of ways", just not without. We learn about a lot of US crimes by the reporting of US citizens and journalists, a lot of which is available to buy and re-print within the US. Meanwhile, people in China still cannot simply remember Tiananmen, much less publish books about it.

Do you even understand what you wrote? Because it's practically incoherent.

> They are not what they are to you, they are not just whatever you care about, they are what they actually are.

You wrote that. It's a useless comment, adds nothing to the discussion and reads like you are trying to be clever and failing at it. Learn to articulate.

It's true, at least the Chinese government is competent in their authoritarianism.

Then why did you respond with a useless self aggrandising comment?

Love the arguments btw. Your position is so cut and dry that you can’t even support it with evidence.

The independent media reports on this and that’s why you know.

China has zero independent media and has the largest and most sophisticated censorship and surveillance state in the world.

Trump would love to have the absolute power that Xi has, but thankfully doesn’t.

Tired of this lazy whataboutism.

Btw how much media coverage have you seen in America related to the genocide of Gaza ? Jewish terrorism in West Bank?

That’s what I thought. There is a reason independent journalists on YT are having great success right now because legacy media is trash, bought and paid for.

Why do you think journalists are creating shows like “Mehdi Hasan unfiltered”?

You can’t in goodwill with a straight face say American media is just. Western media overall is bought and paid for.

>Btw how much media coverage have you seen in America related to the genocide of Gaza ? Jewish terrorism in West Bank?

>That’s what I thought.

Wow, you got me with your nonsequitur strawman argument that you answered yourself and isn't even true. It's easy to identify sophists with how quickly the bring up Israel out of nowhere.

Whataboutism is the rallying cry of every sophist who can dish it but not take it. Whataboutismism

My comment doesn't even fall into the category of whataboutism....

No, actually trump bragged about it on x.

Trump kicked and banned major news orgs from the White House just now. You’d have to be will fully ignorant or really naive to believe we have fair and just media.

There's no "pulling back" things that have already been open sourced.

Unfortunately most of the Chinese models are open weights and not open sourced.

I agree it would be very cool if they were open sourced, but the article is talking about the KV cache technique which if I understand correctly is open source (or at least the white paper is published).

Intelligence wants to be free

Every workplace is an authoritarian regime where workers don't have a say and grovel with "please don't replace me" like that isn't the entire point.

The whole point of AI is to get rid of you so rich people can play with the planet like it's minecraft. Software engineers just think they're special because they're the ones building it like they'll get a pat on the head for being good little servants to the investor class. Or worse, that their portfolios will let them be the gods who rule over ashes.

Yes, we already discussed the US.

It's crazy how articles like this get spawn-camped by people like this trying to throw this zinger in. Both AI conpanies in the US and the chinese companies with ccp desks in the corner can be bad. The good path forward is locally hosted AI models, that's known.

Right, which is why I'm happy to see China continue to innovate in the open, and increasingly wary of the US stance given articles like

https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

It's VERY clear that the US companies are trying to push for regulation to kill open models and open weights. I see this as much more hostile and authoritarian response than what we're seeing come out of China right now.

So is China going to always publish in the open? No clue. But right now they're modeling much better behavior.

What's on my drives stays on my drives.

It is in the interest of everybody-except-OpenAI and Anthropic that those companies have capable competitors; better still for the competitors to share their advances.

They don't have to be our friends to act in our interest.

Agreed, the US is not your friend and will pull the rug from under you at the first convenient opportunity.

Just like how Anthropic and OpenAI is already doing?

China is much more authoritarian than the US, but at this point it's like comparing two types of metastatic cancer.

The point is get what you can from both to develop open models, data and tools.

While your friend is Sam Altman, or US megacorps ?

Or did they not pull back when their models allegedly became highly capable, with the whole mythos debacle ?

> An authoritarian regime is not your friend

Absolutely. In fact, the authoritarian regime already did try to force export controls on major frontier labs not long go so this isn't a theoretical.

Ironically the US is the only country that has done that

At that point the US will complete its China conversion and turn on the GFW so you can't access Chinese AI services.

At least their non friendly AIs aren't bombing schools.

You can be grateful to individual things an enemy does.

Their models are already highly capable. They have enough leverage to act like scumbags, yet unlike Americans, they lack the compulsion for it. That authoritarian regime you fearmonger about has in fact done an excepetional job for its people over the last half century.

This is equally true for US AI

Chill, Buddy. Why are you so anti-American?

>distillation datasets

You ask about distillation but I wonder, is there any training datasets (~ TB-order) available that startup folks in SV use or is it so that everyone has to create their own scraping pipeline ?

There are several? And there exists companies whose entire business is just providing them? iirc

It's particularly important we all scan and destroy our own unique books!

Given the amount of people complaining about crawlers in the past 2 years, I think it's the latter

> I think it's critical that AI be democratized and not isolated in the hands of a few private companies.

While I'd like to agree with this, the fact is that pushing the frontier out has always taken (and folks expect to continue to take) hundreds of millions/billions of dollars. Open source and distilled models can follow on for much cheaper, but it's hard to imagine the frontier ever being "democratized" given the huge sums of money required. It was this realization that forced OpenAI to take tons of private investment in the first place.

That's ok. They took a few trillion worth of content and burned a couple of hundred billion of their own money. I really don't see the problem, if they didn't think about this long and hard before they went down that part it should not be on the rest of us to bail them out. The 'frontier' is less important than the democratization process.

The amount of progress that came out of academia and other public sources should not be underestimated either and without all that OpenAI and Anthropic wouldn't even exist.

This would be true if Chinese models would be strictly distillations of frontier models, but in fact they also train on Chinese data Western models don't have access to.

there's https://pirateface.co/ which is like huggingface but distributed via torrents

The Chinese models are to an extent that distillation data.

There’s a libertarian sentiment that that doesn’t sit well with “AI is harming people” sentiment. If AI has harmful uses, and I think anyone sensible would have to agree that it does, then giving everyone unrestricted AI is likely to make it worse.

It’s sort of like gun nuts arguing that more guns is the answer. I mean, ok, maybe you’re a responsible gun owner or AI user but relying on personal responsibility doesn’t fix systemic problems. There are bad people out there.

If food has harmful uses, and I think any one sensible would have to agree that it does, then giving everyone unrestricted food is likely to make it worse.

You can do this with cars, tools, computers, ... whatever you want. So, no, I think your point is wrong.

We do in fact have car and food safety laws. Regulation is normal.

Safety laws are the wrong category, the equivalent regulations would be those that forbid the use of cars for drive-by shootings or as robbery getaway vehicles, and regulations against the use of food to provide crime energy.

Yes, it makes sense to be against bad regulations. We should try to do better than that.

Guns are highly regulated. Try getting a gun in liberal California, where Reagan screwed us.

Now, what I want to regulate are accordions.

I have purchased a gun in California, and I thought the process was pretty reasonable. Maybe even too lax.

I am a responsible accordion owner and I think we’re doing ok :)

Haven’t tried getting a gun in California. How bad is it? How could it be improved?

> Haven’t tried getting a gun in California. How bad is it? How could it be improved?

You have to pass a basic knowledge test, have a clean background, prove residency in the state, be 21 (or 18 for hunting rifles, IIRC) and then wait 10 days.

Which is to say that it’s a very burdensome process if you think you should be able to go to Walmart, exchange cash for goods, and walk out with a gun, but pretty simple by the standards of regulated goods. The basic knowledge test is very basic, so the pain points are just that sometimes background checks are incorrect, the waiting period can be inconvenient, and just the general annoyances of government bureaucracy.

A gun is not a good. It’s a right.

It’s not like we ask to wait for 2 weeks when you have something to say or when you want to pray to your god.

> It’s a right.

Not if you're a felon or have mental health issues.

It’s interesting that the SCOTUS still hasn’t decided why non violent felons who have served their sentence get their 2A rights cancelled.

Free speech is a right, too, but we regulate that.

Yes, we define crimes based on what you say. For example, libel or yelling “fire” at a movie theater.

But you are allowed to say whatever you want. If what you say is reflected as an offense, then you get some consequence (I am not speaking of UK where you can post something about immigrants in Facebook and get arrested; I’m speaking only of USA).

There are gun regulations too. Most are reasonable, but many are not. Liberals think that they can simply restrict the right to guns unconstitutionally because “guns are scary.” That is clearly not a sufficient basis to deny a right.

In the case of LA County, they just settled with the Feds because they had approved 2 concealed carry permits out of thousands of applications. That clearly shows the government was simply curtailing your right.

It depends on the county. Some Sheriffs think it’s them who gives you your RIGHT to own a gun or a concealed weapon license. They don’t understand they are servants.

LA just settled the Fed lawsuit over their terrible practices:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-13/doj-la-s...

Nice try Philipp Mainländer!

I simply don't trust the people who would decide who gets AI (or guns) to make good choices.

This is a common populist sentiment, but if you don’t trust anyone then nothing can be done. Is it just game over?

It’s not game over because AI doomers are wrong in their projections. LLMs are a transformative technology like the internet, but they’re also overhyped and the useful applications aren’t as broad as people think they are. They’re also not Skynet.

I’m also skeptical about some projections, particularly for robotics, but on the Internet at least, it does seem like AI is automating most things, more or less as predicted. We already have botnets and had one notorious AI botnet swarm, fortunately easily shut down without doing any real damage. I don’t think we’ve seen the last AI botnet.

AI-automated warfare is looking pretty scary too. I don’t think it will stay in Ukraine.

Time will tell. I think the problems will come from humans automating things that shouldn’t be automated, like the disaster of the Minab school targeting, not out-of-control superintelligence.

Viruses don't need to be intelligent at all and smart viruses (or AI internet worms) won't need to be superintelligent to be a real pain to deal with. DoS attacks due to scraping are bad enough already.

The situation is sort of like the Internet before broadband. There probably aren't enough AI-capable home machines to have big swarms of bots that run autonomously. If the swarm depends on an LLM API, it will be easier to cut it off once it's noticed.

I think it's an even chance that we will see a bot swarm in the wild (rather than coming from an AI lab) by the end of next year.

Right, but the internet survived the Melissa virus and other early widespread worm attacks. They caused widespread disruption and economic damage, but they weren’t the end of the world. And besides, at present people are using AI to find and patch software at a faster rate than they are using it to compromise software (more dollars are allocated to security these days).

IMHO the biggest problems will be with poorly written AI slop software, probably small business crapware produced with minimal investment (maybe entirely without an experienced developer) and legacy equipment that’s been abandoned by the manufacturer. This will lead to disruption but not catastrophe.

Certainly no “anyone” and who happens to be worse than no one.

This is a common populist argument

I didn't say I don't trust anyone. Don't put words in my mouth, it's a sign of bad faith.

Other countries have governments that have earned that level of trust. I believe the US could get there eventually, but it will take a very long time because it has a very long way to go.

Okay, sorry about that. But how do we start? Maybe there are AI safety organizations that deserve our support?

> giving everyone unrestricted AI is likely to make it worse

Worse for whom?

The only effective defense against predatory corporate and government AI is personal protective AI.

Anything else is unilateral disarmament. It's the only way individuals can survive in the worse case scenario.

> gun nuts

Guns are different. They can't protect you against the government, contrary to gun nut claims.

All concerns balance against competing concerns, and in this case freedom of computing and knowledge wins over safety. Especially since it’s trivial to copy and share open models.

Okay, you’re asserting that but I disagree. Why should anyone else be convinced? Why can’t we get the good uses without the harms? It doesn’t seem like an unavoidable tradeoff.

I agree that it isn't an unavoidable tradeoff in principle, but looking back at our (as in humanity) track record, it is 99% likely to be.

Populist doomers will tell you that nobody can be trusted, no global problems will ever be solved, nothing can be done, game over, don’t even try.

People did use global agreements and regulation to fix the ozone hole, though, so I think there’s a chance.

Well then do your best, people like me will keep sharing models just fine. (Not like I even do anything with them, but I’m a compulsive data hoarder.) It’s not like the copyright industry has been able to stop sharing either, and there’s serious money at stake there.

I predict that the AI scaremongering will fizzle out when the bubble bursts. There will still be die-hard believers but the public will lose interest.

You’re not releasing new models though.

I don’t see how a stock market crash will make AI-related concerns go away. There was a dot-com crash but the Internet just kept getting bigger and causing more problems. In many ways security has improved, but we worry more than ever about social media, etc.

I guess I don’t really see the internet as a disaster, sure it brings issues but so did factories and mass production, and so will AI.

I wouldn’t say the Internet is a disaster either, but there are disasters where people died due to factories exploding, letting off toxic gases (like in Bhopal), and so on. That’s why there are regulations to try to prevent industrial accidents.

For Internet-related disasters where people died, see [1].

I would bet that there will be AI-related disasters. Arguably the US bombing a school in Iran counts, though it seems to be due to organizational issues, too.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6abd4e3226b48191a26a0fe6768c722f

Actually I think profits win over safety.

Gun owner enters the conversation. In high trust societies, armed people are very polite people. I don’t want the bad guys out there being the only ones with guns. Besides I like to shoot just like you like (whatever you like to do that is legal).

Replace “gun” with anything and you will see how your comment falls apart.

What’s next? A registry for food purchases? Your beer gut is starting to show.

If you mean high-trust societies like maybe Switzerland, I agree that it can work, but the US has lots of guns and doesn’t seem very polite, so how we’re doing it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

We do have lots of food safety regulation, which has more to do with selling food.

Unlike food, guns are your right.

That seems unfortunate. I think a lot of people would prefer the reverse.

Fortunately there is no right to AI.

Nothing that some other person has to give you can be a right.

A right is not something the government gives you. In the US, the Bill of Rights does not actually give you rights. You are born with rights. The Bill of Rights simply clarifies that the government CANNOT RESTRICT YOUR RIGHTS.

> In high trust societies, armed people are very polite people

Surely you could name three such societies?

Just go to ChatGPT and ask:

List 20 high trust societies

I'm asking you, and furthermore I'm not asking for a list of high trust societies, I'm asking for ones in which "armed people are very polite people".

Switzerland, Wyoming, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, Czech Republic, Finland, Norway, most Rural America.

Anyway, ChatGPT can answer your questions. Or just visit your local gun range. I highly recommend it.

I grew up in rural America.

The original claim was: > in high trust societies, armed people are very polite people

In my experience, there was no connection between being armed and being polite.

> Or just visit your local gun range

Went to one many times when I lived in Texas, I think I've inhaled enough lead to last me the rest of my life.

"An armed society is a polite society" was originally said by Heinlein, who for all his faults would have had something to say about outsourcing your thinking to a machine.

I grew up in Rural America too. In my experience, armed people are very polite.

I don’t outsource my thinking to a machine. I was asking you to not outsource your thinking to a stranger, since I am not your private encyclopedia.

I would say that there are very few people on earth that I trust less than Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk. Also my own government claims to have used Anthropic models to bomb a girls' school in Iran. If you combine US regulations with sociopathic private companies, you get into a worst case scenario for humanity imho. Again, I'm thankful to China or any other entity pushing open models, local models and even distribution of this technology.

Maybe there are other organizations that deserve our support?

I'm happy to support anyone pushing for open models, local models and publishing their innovations out in the open.

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